by Bill Barich
“Good, boss.”
“Then we’ll let you sit with us, won’t we, Antonio?”
“He can sit with us,” Antonio said slyly. “But he can’t have any of our peppers.”
“I doubt he even wants any. Do you, Omar?” Atwater held out the jar, and when the boy reached for it, he snatched it right back. “You see? I told you he didn’t want any.”
Omar feigned uninterest and sat cross-legged on the ground. He peeled away the aluminum foil on his burrito, bit into the flour tortilla, and pouched his cheek with rice, beans, and roast pork. He cast away some hated green peas before taking a second huge bite, listening carefully to the talk in English. He understood some words but not others and had to parse out the meaning. The boss Atwater was saying something about how if he had his own farm, how on that farm he would just taste the fruit and fuck all the scientific something, and Antonio was saying something about an old man by the name of Victor, and the boss was saying yes, the old man knew, he got reports by teléfono, all superior news so far and something about grapes both red and white.
“Now, can I have a pepper, please?” Omar’s fingers were busy between his teeth.
“Yes, you can have a pepper, you no-good little bastard.” Atwater passed over the jar. “You’ll need it to keep your strength up. We start on the red grapes soon.”
“I can pick any grape,” the boy bragged. “I am a campeón.”
“Yeah, well, wait till you try our Cabernet. I had a picker cry on me once, he got so pissed off.”
Antonio made a circle the size of a BB shot with a thumb and an index finger. “Check this out, Omar. Those grapes are this small, man. You get in there, you never saw so many clusters on one plant. And they stink like weeds.”
“Cabs are way tart, too,” Atwater put in.
“You eat some Cabernet off the vine,” Antonio advised the boy, “and your mouth will pucker up as tight as your asshole.”
Omar pushed around the peas he’d thrown away, linking them in a circle. “I can pick any grape,” he said again. “Any grape.”
The crew labored until late in the afternoon, steady and determined. At quitting time, Omar had logged in thirty-eight lugs, an average day for him. Only three pickers had done better. He did not know how many clusters that represented. It could have been four, five, even seven thousand. It could have been a whole million. He had tried counting once, but the arithmetic was too tough for him, with the numbers cycling upward so fast that he couldn’t keep track of them. The numbers interfered with the smooth flow of his body in action, so he had let them go. Adios, arithmetic.
He wrapped a handkerchief around his grape knife, put it in a pocket, and walked up the dirt road to the spot where all the cars were parked. His tired mates stood around gulping water from bottles, repaying and incurring debts, and arranging their rides home. There was always someone going Omar’s way. The valley at twilight was thronged with pickers on wheels, heading into town or south toward Santa Rosa. They were all involved in a unique mass-transit system that had no fixed rules and turned instead on the sentimental attachments of clans and pueblos. Sometimes the boy had to shell out a small fare for the trip, but that happened only when he rode with a person who was not on his crew or not from Jalisco.
That evening, as ever, he got out at Roy’s Market and went into the store to buy his dinner. He encountered the usual racket inside as men jostled in the aisles, joking around, trading gossip and insults, and crowing about the progress they had made in the fields, often exaggerating their claims and translating them into a vast and imaginary sum of money that would accrue to them, which was translated again into more bricks or concrete blocks for the houses that many of them were building, harvest by harvest, in Mexico. Omar browsed through the deli case and selected a day-old ham and cheese sandwich on a torpedo roll that was priced at a discount, some chocolate milk, and a bag of Fritos, and he felt honored and substantial when the lady clerk let him put his purchase on a tab to be paid at the end of the week.
The cabin was a bane to him now. Overcrowding had robbed him of what little privacy he had. So many men came and went that he never knew for sure who would be bunking next to him. The captain ruled with a tyrant’s fist and even collected a few quarters from the po-brecitos who were forced to sleep in blankets on the floor. The space intended for six or eight people routinely housed fifteen or twenty. It was cramped and dirty and stank of the food stored under cots and the sweaty clothes that nobody had time to wash, except on Sunday. Omar had feared that the conditions would attract la migra, but he had learned that la migra almost never sent any agents to Carson Valley while the grapes were being picked.
“Buenas tardes!” the captain greeted him jovially as he entered. “El muchacho amarillo!”
The men reclining on their cots all laughed. Every picker in the cabin had a nickname, whether or not he liked it, because the captain wanted it that way. Omar was among those who did not like it. He was called Yellow Boy because of his bumblebee jacket.
In the dark before dawn, he woke to a grumbling rustle of activity. Someone was pissing in the sink, someone blew his nose, someone tuned a radio to syncopated salsa music, and someone else groaned and coughed up sputum. The men put on the same soiled shirts and caked jeans that they had worn the day before and took turns marching to the washhouse. They boiled water for coffee on hot plates and ate a breakfast of whatever they had at hand, canned peanuts or licorice whips or cereal eaten dry, right from the box. Omar rode to the farm with El Remolacho, who had a beet-red face and was known casually as Remo, and a terribly filthy picker, El Feo, whose face was so wretched and ugly that a child who had looked at it by accident once had reportedly dropped dead. They sat in the bed of a Nissan truck driven by the ugly one’s brother, huddling together in the chill morning breeze and watching as the light spread over the valley and the grapevines came into view all splotched with dots of color, the ambers, pink-tinged greens, red-browns, and blacks that they had come to know so well.
It was a Friday. They were picking Chardonnay again and finished with the very last rows around eleven o’clock. Omar was puzzled about what he would do with himself if there was no more work that afternoon. He milled about with the others until word filtered into their ranks that the weekly paychecks were being distributed. He walked to the barn with the beet-faced picker and joined a line at the card table, where the boss sat punching figures into an electronic calculator. Atwater looked harried and distracted, and he surprised everyone when he announced that they would not pick on Saturday or Sunday either because the Cabernet Sauvignon grapes needed a little more time on the vine.
“Here you go, Omar.” The boy accepted his check—only a piece of paper but of great value. “Put that in the vault with the rest of your fortune.”
The check was for almost two hundred dollars after taxes. Already Omar had paid back his cousin and had banked more than five hundred dollars of his own. He tapped the paper against the palm of one hand and mulled over what he might do with his unexpected free time. He saw a leisurely gap between the white and red grapes that was like the parting of a curtain or the opening of a door, and it suggested the possibility of a fiesta to him, a little celebration. He and Antonio ought to drink many beers together as men did on such occasions, so he issued an invitation.
“I take you to La Perla Roja, Antonio,” he said eagerly, beckoning to his cousin. “Come with me there, yes?”
Lopez was refilling a gas can. “I got a million things to do here, Omar. You go on without me.”
“Ah, he’s just scared of his wife,” Atwater quipped. “She’ll bust his balls if he doesn’t head straight home.”
“At least I have a wife,” Lopez shot back. “You don’t even have a girlfriend anymore.”
“Maybe I don’t want one.”
“Everybody wants one, man. Everybody.”
“Come with me, Antonio,” Omar asked again, almost pleading. “Don’t you like me?”
“Why d
on’t you go with the kid?” Atwater said. “A break would do you some good. We all could use a break. I’m sick of you guys’ faces.”
Lopez set down the gas can and slapped at the bees that were still swarming over the farm. “You want to go to La Perla?” he challenged Omar. “Okay, I’ll go with you. But just for one beer.”
“Vamos,” the boy said excitedly. “Yes, let’s go!”
“And I’m not afraid of my wife either, Arthur.”
“Of course you aren’t,” Atwater told him.
They left in Lopez’s car and stopped first at the cabin so that Omar could wash up and change his clothes. The boy was imbued with a profound sense of well-being and felt warmly sheltered in his cousin’s presence, as if nothing could ever go wrong. Even the captain seemed to hold Antonio in esteem and understood his prominence, insisting that they all have a drink from his special bottle of Johnny Walker. Omar belted down a swallow, gagged on it, and spit most of it out. Everyone laughed at him, but for once he didn’t mind. He was a man among men, after all, and bound for a fiesta. He dabbed his underarms with stick deodorant, stuffed the tails of his only clean shirt, a powder-blue polyester, into his dress slacks, put on his yellow jacket despite the heat, and laboriously endorsed his check so that he could deposit it at Carson Valley Savings Bank, reserving sixty dollars in cash for the party.
La Perla Roja, directly across from the bank, was rippling with energy. Omar could feel the pulse of it as he and his cousin stood outside, a throbbing in the veins of the sidewalk as strong as the beating of blood. He peered through a dark window streaked with crimson neon, but he couldn’t really see anything and became apprehensive. He was not old enough to drink legally and was about to mention it when Antonio led him through the door. The tavern fell silent, and everybody looked at them for a few seconds, but then the customers grunted, ignored them, and returned to their beer guzzling, card playing, and games of eight ball. All the anxieties Omar had harbored vanished in an instant, and he was as comfortable as he would have been at home in Guadalajara.
He and Antonio located a vacant table, but they couldn’t have a proper conversation. The jukebox was screaming, so they just leaned back in their chairs and watched people pass through the room, letting the music pound at them. The music was full of joyous release like the songs of mariachis, and Omar snapped his fingers to the trumpets, horns, guitarras, and drums, relaxing and enjoying the raucous atmosphere. He wished that he had a woman to dance with, some beautiful blond as richly endowed as the Tecate girl on the poster in his cabin. After a while, he saw Remo come in and waved madly to him, and Remo joined them at the table and shouted about how fucking much his muscles hurt and how glad he was to be free of the vineyard, if only for a couple of days.
“No me gusta mucho las uvas!” he yelled. Omar smiled. Remo had stated the obvious—he didn’t like those grapes!
“You got it easy, man!” Lopez shouted back, and Omar moved closer to him to hear. “When I was picking, we only made fifty cents a lug!”
“Es verdad?”
“It’s true. Sometimes they even tried to stiff us. One guy over on Pine Ridge, the checks he gave us bounced. They were, like, rubber.”
“Rubber?” Omar asked, unable to picture it. Why would anyone write a check on rubber? It would be like writing on a tire or a basketball.
“Yeah, rubber! But we took care of that guy. We snuck back there one night and poured sugar in the gas tank of his car.” Antonio grinned smugly. “It didn’t run too good after that.”
“Bravo!” Remo congratulated him with a pat on his shoulder and called to a barmaid for another round of Budweisers. “You live here a long time, amigo?”
“He is a veterano,” Omar said with arrogance, as if by being related to Antonio he, too, had acquired an exalted status.
“I been here eight years, Remo,” his cousin said. “But I’ll never become an American, man.”
“Por qué no?”
“I want my own ejido, where I can be the jefe.”
Remo took this in and came up with a question. “Hay ai una buena discoteca acqui?”
Lopez chuckled, shook his head, and slapped the table to underscore his mirth. “A disco? In Carson Valley? No, we don’t have a good disco here.”
“Quisiera una muchacha,” the beet-faced man said genially, unembarrassed by his ignorance. “I want some pussy tonight!”
Remo’s exuberance captured the attention of two dissolute fellows, who were lounging by the jukebox. Omar looked up when one of them began speaking. “Go to Santa Rosa,” the jukebox man told them, cupping his hands beneath his pectorals and leering. “They got topless dancers there. Stripteasers.”
Omar jumped on the suggestion. “Me gustaría ir alla, Antonio,” he said, with enthusiasm. “Yes, take us to the pussy!”
“I know the club he means,” Antonio warned them all. “It isn’t cheap, comprende? A bottle of plain beer, it could cost you up to four dollars. You might have to pay a charge at the door, too.”
Rabbity with ardor, Omar fanned his wad of cash. “I pay!” he shrieked. “Take us to there!”
“They might not like us,” his cousin told him. “Some high-class places, they’re hard to get into.”
“I pay,” Omar reiterated, showing off his wad of money again.
“Yeah, you can pay. But you’ll still be a Mexican.”
“Do you go there before?” the boy asked, his brow knitted. He wanted more than anything for Antonio to lead them to this place.
“Sure, I’ve been there. Those people at that club, I’m real friendly with them. Probably if I go with you I can get you in.”
“Muchachas!” Remo yelled once more, gripping Omar’s shoulder and squeezing it. “Tonight I fuck a California girl!”
They left La Perla Roja in a caravan. The two jukebox men drove an old Chevy, and the beet-faced picker rode a motorcycle. It was dark now, and Omar was feeling the effects of the beer. He could remember nothing about Santa Rosa except for the Greyhound station and observed vigilantly and in wonder as they passed several trailer parks, used-car lots, fast-food joints, and a motel where no one at all was staying and arrived finally at a big rectangular building with bright lights all around it. It had an illuminated sign on the roof, but he couldn’t read it. He pointed to the sign and asked his cousin what it said.
“The Show Room,” Antonio told him. “Because of what the girls show you.”
“What do they show?
“Their tits and everything.”
They all parked in the lot and assembled as a group. Omar was fretful that they might fail to pass muster and be rejected. There was indeed a bouncer at the door, who was collecting a small cover charge. He was barechested under a leather vest, had a shaved head and an earring in the shape of a skull, and started whooping as soon as Lopez and the pickers advanced toward him.
“Be careful now,” Antonio whispered to the others. The boy had a childish urge to hold his cousin’s hand. He felt that if he did not get into the club it would be the worst thing that had ever happened to him—worse than dying, even. “Be cool now.”
When they reached the door, the bouncer laughed right in their faces and rapped his knuckles on the beet-faced picker’s head. “You plan to wear this all night?” he asked. “You look like a freakin’ astronaut.”
“Ay!” Remo fumbled with the chinstrap of his helmet. “I forget!”
They joined in the laughter then, greatly relieved, and poked at Remo’s helmet with their fingers and punched it with their fists, while the bouncer accepted dollars from several hands, although not from Omar’s. “Where’s your ID?” he demanded of the boy. “I need to see a picture ID to let you in.”
“ID?” Omar repeated.
“How old are you, kid?”
“He’s twenty-three,” Antonio said briskly.
“If he’s twenty-three, he must have some kind of fucked-up disease.” The bouncer glanced around. “Give me a ten, and I’ll let you slide,” he sai
d to the boy out of the side of his mouth. “But I never saw you, kid, did I?”
“You never did see me ever,” Omar agreed.
“That’s right. I don’t know how the hell you got in, do I? You snuck in, didn’t you?”
Omar’s head bobbed up and down. “I did sneak in.”
The pickers entered a crowded fetid arena, where a blue spotlight fell on a small stage framed at the apron by red lightbulbs. There were chairs around the stage, some tables to the rear, and a few leatherette booths against the back wall. Omar stopped in his tracks, transfixed by the action. He simply could not move. A young woman with a frizzy permanent, naked except for a G-string, was coiling her willowy legs around a metal firepole to the deafening blast of the Rolling Stones. She looked like a snake to him, someone capable of killing a man with a squeeze of her thighs. He saw other women in bikinis, babydolls, and fishnet stockings circulating to serve cocktails, and if a man held up a bill, one of the waitresses would sit in his lap and wriggle up against him. This was actually taking place in front of Omar’s eyes, a scenario beyond his wildest dreams. He was so frozen in place he might never have moved another inch if his cousin hadn’t grabbed him angrily by his shirt collar and towed him to a table in the second row.
“That’s no way to act in here!” he heard Antonio scream at him. “Act like you been here a lot, will you?”
Omar hung his head in shame. A round of Budweisers appeared on the table, and he paid for them out of guilt. There went another twenty of his dollars.
When the song ended, the frizzy blond started retrieving the clothes she had dropped on stage. Men were throwing bills at her, tossing them at her like baseballs, and she put a hand to her lips and blew them all kisses. The next dancer was so unique that she made Omar gape. His mouth just fell wide open. She was blubbery in the stomach and hips, with cascading rolls of fat, but she had mammoth breasts that she could shake and twirl and even suck. The tassels on her nipples spun mightily. Here was another feminine trick that Omar never would have imagined. He touched his own chest and jiggled his shoulders, trying to duplicate the feat. He felt no desire for the woman really, only an incredulity over her God-given talents. The other pickers at the table poked fun at her, though. One jukebox man snatched at his friend’s crotch and held his hands two feet apart to show the huge size of the hard-on he’d supposedly found there.